Know Your Enemies
by stuartmurphy405
Summary: A short crime story.


Keeping the house clean whilst on call was not easy for Paul Easton-Wells.

Being called away at a moments notice, and for who knows how long, had allowed a large collection of unwanted junk mail to build up behind the solid oak front door. The hallway was a maze of opened and unopened FedEx boxes, contents scattered through to his living room, sparsely decorated by a man with too much on his mind. The kitchen sink was full of dishes and take out menus and deluge drowned the counter work tops, and the stench would alert the neighbours, if he had any. His bedroom wasn't much better, clothes were discarded in all corners and crept up the walls like moss. Except his uniform, which hung proudly and clean on the only hanger in his doorless wardrobe.

These living quarters were a chore that Paul didn't care for. He had other business, more pressing business, beneath the bolted, steel trapdoor in the hidden cut out in his hallway.

Using his strong fingers as hooks he bent to the bottom of his improvised door and eased it open. Flicking the switch for the basement lights also illuminated a small but strong bulb above his head. He needed the light, not to see and grasp the padlocked bolt, but because it was dark in the basement, and he had to see what damage had been done in his absence.

Taking the last step from the folding ladder he turned to survey the cleanest and most cherished room in his house. The bright fluorescent tubes hummed quietly as Paul Easton-Wells took in the three sterilised chambers and the half constructed fourth that took up the corners of his basement.

Each chamber was built into the corner, with clear perspex glass completing the cube. Inside each cube was a small portable toilet with a pipe connected to the water supply that drip fed the storage containers above them. The sink was also connected to the same supply. There was also a small bed, with white linen and a fluffy pillow, in one corner. The one thing that was missing was a light switch. And because of this the three cubed inhabitants were shielding their eyes and crying.

Paul had heard the crying before. At first it gave him a thrill, like when he watched the neighbours undressing from behind their garden trees when he was young. Then it became irritating, like the neighbours dog that barked every Sunday morning when he was a teen, before he stopped it of course. But now the crying was almost like white noise, it soothed him when he heard it, but he had also become very good at shutting it out.

He took his time giving each inhabitant a visual checkup. They were all still alive and it looked as if Number Two had stopped trying to hurt herself, for the time being anyway. Satisfied with the health of his patients, he walked between chamber one and two and removed the dried packets he had ordered from a website in Texas that specialised in, what they called, astronaut food.

He took three packets of peaches, three beef steaks, three dried spinach and three cartons of fresh orange and distributed them through small slits high on each perspex wall.

Paul took out a chair from the fourth, incomplete, chamber and watched his patients eat, then turned towards the task of cutting the piping for the new sink. With luck he would have the fourth cube completed in time for Christmas, where some lucky young thing could move in at the start of the new year.

He was smiling as he worked, cutting the piping and wondering when his new shipment of perspex would be delivered. He ordered it in large sheets to avoid suspicion, but that left him the arduous task of cutting it to fit himself.

As he was pondering this, his work cell phone chirped, the sweet little sound of a spring bird that grated and shredded his nerves, and he knew he was being called away again. Angrily digging the phone from his pocket he read the text message:

AGENT HOTCHNER REQUESTS

WHEELS UP IN 60 MINS

BAU TEAM TO CHARLESTON S.C.

If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles - Sun Tzu


End file.
